——-“The longer a straining and struggling set of truths, in their most exquisite, perilous expression, are kept from the consideration, the view, of a gluttonous, decadent public, the more they will, he is sure, come to utterly define the age. What he means is, the longer his voice is unheard, and his words ignored, the more their future is secured. What once had, in the competition between his contemporaries, only an outside chance of permanence, now earns the ultimate guarantee, because it has outlasted all their antics, and their sneers. History, he says to himself, will serve his texts up as the exemplar case itself, the vital reference to the times when they were written, though he felt an incomprehensible shadow of doom the whole while he was stubbornly at work. But his stockpiled descriptions, even the loose opinions of his fictional characters, his fallible scenery, even though fawned over as utterly obscure by a few, and never pictured by the rest, as it gushed and spilled from his pen, shall go down as the best available report, carefully composed with fidelity and sensitivity. Amazing! As if he knew intimately the habits and thoughts of the very same people who, at the time, declared him incomprehensible. Though of course the question of there being a future time, in the consciousness of any indolent reader, swinging in a hammock on a summer day, so to speak, is rendered problematic right within his suspenseful narrations, which seem almost in every sentence to pose an existential question, or internalize an eternal quandary–only to dramatically withdraw it. out of concern for this same, maybe happy reader. As if it were too much to speak, really, about life right as it is happening, but one must always be removed, be comfortable, in order to consider what he is about to say. He is the equivocal author who is on a par with the reader, who is the profound target. As if the book, his book now, but any book really, was an invitation to revelation, and could only fall from your hands, as it suddenly struck you what it was saying.”

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QUOTES

"I'm continually testing myself, yes, that's what it is! I keep chasing my own tail! You cannot imagine what it is like, when you open yourself like a book, and find misprints everywhere, one after another, misprints on every page! And in spite of those hundreds and thousands of misprints, the whole thing is masterly! It's a whole series of masterpieces! . . . The pain rises from below or comes down from above, and it becomes human pain. I keep banging into the walls that surround me on every side. I'm a cement man! But I've often had to hold on to myself behind my laughter!"FROST, Thomas Bernhard

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"He found by experience the truth of that law, always unbelievable and always proclaimed, that an artist is invariably hated in exact proportion to his greatness, and that if his strength gives out, when the baying pack are hunting him, he won't even find a plough-boy generous enough to refrain from stretching out his plough-share to trip him up. The Great Holiday of mankind is to see the death of whatever does not seem mortal."THE WOMAN WHO WAS POOR(1897) Leon Bloy